Contents

Introduction

We try to have screenshots on our website for all games that we support. The purpose of this page is to describe how new screenshots are to be made to ensure uniform overall quality. In particular, what scaler you should use, how files should be named etc.

For each game, we would like to have a small (say, between 2 and 5) number of screenshots which give users a good idea of what the game looks like to play. If the game is available in different languages or versions, it would also be nice to have a screenshot or two showing the differences of those versions.
Take a look at our existing screenshots of The Secret of Monkey Island as an example.

List of game category icons we need

How to make screenshots

Here are additional rules on how to make screenshots which were settled in the last couple of years: (Of course any suggestions are welcome!)

Check if this particular screenshot hasn't already been committed.

If there is no visual difference between an already submitted screenshot and your game version, don't submit it.

If you are submitting screenshots for non-English game, use only those which have visual difference (changed graphics) or have something written in that language.

ScummVM settings

Pick an interesting scene to take the screenshot of.

320x200 games should be run with HQ2x (Ctrl+Alt+3) mode with aspect correction (Ctrl+Alt+a) mode on. I.e. it should be 640x480 image.

640x480 games should be run without scaler.

On platforms which use the SDL backend (Win32 and *nix included) Alt+S creates a screenshot file called scummvmXXXXX.bmp inside the current directory.

Make sure your screenshot is 640x480 and was made with HQ2x scaler (if originally 320x200). Otherwise it won't be accepted.

If the game runs at a different resolution (such as 512x384, or 800x600), use the normal mode (no scaling) and make sure your screenshot is at the original resolution.

Screenshot file details.

Screenshots should not contain any window decorations.

The only supported file format is PNG with maximum compression.

Preferably run OptiPNG and advpng after that. Use default parameters for OptiPNG and -4 parameter for advpng for best results. If you don't, we'll have to do it later.

File name is gametarget[-platform][-lang]-X-full.png where:

gametarget is the game target name, see our compatibility page for the full list

platform is an optional parameter for cases when you submit non-PC game version screenshots

lang is an optional parameter when screenshot for non-English version

X is a sequental number.

Create a .txt file containing the file names followed by full game name and optionally provide the platform name and language in parenthesis. For example "Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (Amiga German)"

There is no need to provide titles for every file if they're all the same. Use your discretion.

If possible, use the mkthumb.sh script to produce thumbnail versions of your screenshots. If you don't have it or can't use it, then save in interlaced JPEG scaled down to 256 pixel width with quality 0.33 (or higher, watch for the compression artifacts). Optionally you can commit/submit only PNG and TXT and we will create the thumbnails for you.

How to make game icon

On screenshots page you may see the set of nice 'headshots' used for the games. If you are submitting screenshots for a new game, you may help with creating the icon too.

You will need GIMP 2.8.x for making the icon:

Pick some distinguishable graphics from the game. In most cases, it is head of the main character or image of the main item in the game (such as the hourglass for Ween)

Make its background transparent by carefully painting over all unneeded pixels

Magnify the image

If the background is not solid-colored, fill it with some color unused in the image. Acid green works well in most cases :)

With Select By Color tool select the background

Invert the selection

Add layer mask -> use selection as layer mask

Apply the layer mask

Downscale image to 44x44 or less. Make sure that you're using bicubic scaling, and that features of the image are still recognizable